Download Semantics (Palgrave Modern Linguistics) by Kate Kearns PDF

This is often an introductory textbook in semantics for decrease point undergraduates, together with huge finish of bankruptcy routines and recommendations for extra analyzing. the most objective of the e-book is to supply an exceptional knowing of a number of semantic phenomena and matters in semantics, adopting a fact conditional account of that means, yet with out utilizing a compositional formalism. The e-book assumes no specific heritage in linguistics or philosophy, and the entire technical instruments used are defined as they're brought. the fashion goals to be obtainable, with a number of examples.

The valuable target of this research is to clarify the character of the semantics / pragmatics contrast in either synchrony and diachrony. the writer proposes a definition of semantics and pragmatics that's orthogonal to the query of truth-conditionality, and discusses the prestige of varied sorts of that means with recognize to this definition.

This is often the 1st e-book to strategy depictive secondary predication - a scorching subject in syntax and semantics learn - from a crosslinguistic point of view. It maps out all of the proper phenomena and brings jointly severe surveys and new contributions on their morphosyntactic and semantic homes.

The pioneering linguist Benjamin Whorf (1897--1941) grasped the courting among human language and human pondering: how language can form our innermost innovations. His easy thesis is that our conception of the realm and our methods of brooding about it are deeply motivated by way of the constitution of the languages we converse.

This instruction manual contains, in 3 volumes, an in-depth presentation of the cutting-edge in linguistic semantics from a wide selection of views. It includes 112 articles written through major students from worldwide. those articles current precise, but obtainable, introductions to key concerns, together with the research of particular semantic different types and buildings, the historical past of semantic learn, theories and theoretical frameworks, technique, and relationships with similar fields; furthermore, they provide specialist tips on subject matters of discussion in the box, at the strengths and weaknesses of current theories, and at the most probably instructions for the longer term improvement of semantic study.

K) Adding Connectives Using and , write logical forms for the sentences below. Note that (6) is ambiguous so there are two forms for it. Grammar A generates all and only well-formed formulae. Clive gave every child a biscuit or a Batman comic. Zoe read all the death notices but nothing else. There’s no business like show business. ) Chairman Miaou is heavier and meaner than any spaniel. Every prize was won by some high school kid. FURTHER READING Allwood, Andersson and Dahl’s (1977) Logic in Linguistics is an accessible introduction to first order logic and is particularly recommended.

5. The chief general difference between material implication and conditional sentences is that if is commonly not simply truth-functional in actual use. Given that material implication is truth-functional, the truth of an implication proposition depends only on a certain combination of truth values for the contained propositions, and the actual content or subject matter of those propositions is irrelevant. Logically, (18) expresses a perfectly fine (and true) implication, but it is odd as a conditional sentence.

Many theories analyse sentence meaning in terms of truth conditions, and such theories are called truth-conditional theories. Theories which analyse meaning in terms of referring to, denoting or describing things, situations and events in the world (or in possible worlds) are denotational theories. Most formal semantic theories are both denotational and truth-conditional. So far, the tools we have to analyse meaning are these: we have reality itself, also called the actual world, and all the infinitely many possible alternative ways reality might have been – these are the possible worlds (including the actual world).